Categories
Philosophy

The Unpluggable Hole: Dao, Time and the Logic of Persistence

Reality cannot be complete: absence, difference and delay sustain the recursive probabilistic dynamics through which (self-) organisation persists.

Categories
Philosophy

The Logic that Lives

Life is organised difference sustained through recursive probabilistic and spectral dynamics.

Categories
Philosophy

Metaphysical Evil: A Philosophy of Power and Cruelty

Cruelty grows through small, rational choices that make power easier to preserve and other people easier to discard.

Categories
Philosophy

The Reproduction of Authority: Cybernetics and Institutional Power at the Australian National University

I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.

Categories
Philosophy

The Big Empty: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Generative Logic of Absence

Absence is not the opposite of existence, but the generative condition through which difference, organisation, consciousness and cosmos emerge and persist.

Categories
Philosophy

Power Is Not Authority: Why the United States Cannot Abolish the International Criminal Court

The power to destroy an institution does not confer the authority to abolish it. The United States cannot extinguish the International Criminal Court through coercion without replacing the legal principles upon which its own claims to sovereignty and authority depend.

Categories
Philosophy

Peace, man…

You wouldn’t think peace would be so difficult, but we’ve built an entire civilisation around making war easier.

Categories
Philosophy politics

Spectacular Cruelty: Public Executions and Political Power

A civilisation that turns its moral deterioration into public spectacle reorganises the relationships through which political power is recognised, contested and reproduced, making cruelty both a symptom of its decline and a means of perpetuating it.

Categories
cybernetics

The Narrowing of Possibility: Technology, Conformity and Civilisational Fragility

Our extraordinary technological and expressive abundance conceals a narrowing of possibility, as the systems rewarding innovation and success make civilisation increasingly fragile.

Categories
Philosophy

The Precarity of Thinking

Ideas are fragile, and their expression more so. In a culture increasingly synchronised by fear, hatred and repetition, independent thought becomes an act of integrity, and the freedom to communicate something genuinely different becomes increasingly precious.

Categories
cybernetics

Ignaz Semmelweis: The Cost of Being Right

The story of Ignaz Semmelweis, whose life-saving discovery reveals how established practices can obstruct new knowledge, with profound human consequences.

Categories
cybernetics

Stop Worshipping Wankers: Wealth, Power and the Myth of Genius

We mistake extreme wealth for extraordinary human worth, celebrating billionaires as visionaries while overlooking the collective labour, public investment and institutional power behind their fortunes. It’s time to stop confusing wealth with wisdom.